These were actually the suggestion of [Phil Torrone]. He founded Hackaday way back in 2004 and is now CEO of Adafruit Industries. Shortly after I asked him to record a remembrance of his time at Hackaday for the anniversary party he suggested these boards (normally blue and missing our logo) as a limited-edition for the event. It took just two weeks for them to crank out 585 of them.

I’m most likely biased for many reasons. Obviously I like putting the skull and wrenches on everything, and black solder mask is just cool. I also adore the ATmega328 (my 8-bit go-to chip for prototyping) and am especially fond of this form factor as it makes for super simple on-the-go firmware coding.

Once we sell 560 of them they will never return. We’re betting that Adafruit will have an even better minuscule breakout board for our 25th Anniversary. Do you think quantum computing will have trickled down to the single-chip prototyping stage by then?

Update: We’ve updated shipping rates on the store. Orders over $25 in the USA now have free shipping. International shipping is free for orders over $50. We will continue to try and reduce shipping rates as much as possible. We’re new to this so stay tuned!

Back in 2005, the Arduino was just a twinkle in they eyes of [Massimo Banzi] and the other core developers. Since then, you can’t go to any electronics site without hitting something beginning with ‘ard~’ or ending with ‘~duino’. The platform has become so popular, people everywhere are piggybacking on the name to the point of trademark infringement or simply outright counterfeiting one of the many official Arduino boards. Now [Massimo] has something to say about these clones, ripoffs, derivatives, and ‘duino-compatible boards.

On the list of things bad for the open source ecosystem, [Massimo] points to direct clones of existing Arduino boards. While these boards are electrically identical to officially licensed boards, they simply don’t support the Arduino project financially and usually don’t contribute to the existing libraries and code. Even worse are counterfeits; these boards copy the trademarks of the Arduino project – sometimes terribly given the three examples above (guess which one is the real one) – and directly profit off of the Arduino project without giving any support in return.

There are other veins of Arduino that [Massimo] considers more acceptable. Arduino-compatible boards, seen by the dozen over on Kickstarter, usually add something of their own, be it a radio chip, or an entirely different microcontroller. Derivatives, like Teensy and Adafruit’s Flora actually bring new things to the table with improved hardware and new and interesting libraries.

As far as counterfeits and clones go, we can’t agree more with what [Massimo] has to say. You have to admire the folks in the Arduino project being so open about their creations and admiring the Arduino derivatives that bring some new hardware to the table. Then again, that’s the lesson of the Arduino project; you can make hardware open source and still be outrageously popular.